1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a vehicle periphery motoring device which monitors a vehicle periphery by detecting a monitoring object located in the vehicle periphery according to a captured image by an imaging unit mounted in the vehicle, a vehicle periphery motoring program and a vehicle periphery motoring method.
2. Description of the Related Art
Conventionally, there has been known a vehicle periphery monitoring device (for example, refer to Japanese Patent No. 3515926) which detects a monitoring object located in a vehicle periphery according to a captured image about the vehicle periphery taken by a camera mounted in the vehicle. Moreover, as an extracting approach of extracting a contour of an image portion in the captured image, Snakes algorithm, for example, is known (for example, refer to M. Kass, A. Witkin, D. Terzopoulos “Snakes: Active Contour Models”, International Journal of Computer Vision, Vol. 2 No. 3, 1988).
Therefore, it has been considered to extract a contour of an image portion contained in a captured image by a camera mounted in a vehicle and discriminate a type of a monitoring object in a real space corresponding to the image portion according to the features of the contour, thereby to improve discrimination accuracy on discriminating the type of the monitoring object.
However, since the throughput of a convergence computation for extracting the contour is enormous, it is necessary to use a computer of high performance. Thus, for a vehicle mounted with a computer of ordinary performance, it will take longer time to perform the contour extraction processing. Consequently, it is difficult to adopt the object-type discrimination based on the contour extraction in a vehicle periphery monitoring device in which real time processing is required.